


Brother, I'm tired of the wind and the rain

by De_Nugis



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-07
Updated: 2011-05-07
Packaged: 2017-10-19 04:05:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,799
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/196673
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/De_Nugis/pseuds/De_Nugis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>angsty curtain!fic with angry waterfowl</p>
            </blockquote>





	Brother, I'm tired of the wind and the rain

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cordelia_gray](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cordelia_gray/gifts).



> 1\. title from a ballad about a goose woman I read in Rosemary Sutcliffe's _The Shield Ring_. I don't know if Sutcliffe wrote it herself or where she found it if she didn't. 2. This is the unbelievably late birthday fic for [](http://cordelia-gray.livejournal.com/profile)[ **cordelia_gray**](http://cordelia-gray.livejournal.com/). Her birthday was five months ago, so I can only apologize both for the delay and for the fact that this is a weird, discombobulated fic, and not 100% cheerful (though I hope it is hopeful) and sadly lacking in porn. And that after she wrote me FIVE blowjobs. I'm a bad friend. 3. Because I began it way back when it would have been timely, this goes AU after 6.11, and I didn't try to harmonize details with later canon. I am positing a few months between the events of 6.11 and the start of this story, which I think puts 6.11 somewhat earlier than it seems to be in the canon timeline.

On the afternoon of January 23rd, Sam Winchester walks the two blocks from the apartment to the housewares store to buy his brother a birthday present.

It’s chilly for this mild climate, and bright, one of those winter days that require sunglasses. Sam makes do with squinting. Perhaps he still owns shades, but he doesn’t know where they’d be. He doesn’t get out much.

He feels huge and incongruous in the shop, or maybe displaced in time, surrounded by people looking at napkin rings and pasta makers and miniature vacuum pumps for wine bottles. Tools of a life whose ashes he barely remembers sorting through. He and Jess mostly had just the basics from Ikea, anyway. He tries to reconstruct that sense of settled adventure he’d felt in Palo Alto, putting dishes away in cupboards, but for the life of him he can’t remember what it was like to want juice glasses. Everything here is shiny chrome or brightly colored; it must be exhausting to want it. But he only has to imagine Dean wanting things. One thing.

“Can I help you find anything?” He turns to confront a grey-haired woman with a red apron and a name-tag. For a moment his mind goes blank, the busy, alien gadgetry fading around him, and he thinks _no, no, no_. He needs to get through this thing without hitting a cold spot. He needs to do this.

“A present for my brother,” he says. The woman still looks inquiring, so he adds, “For his birthday. He likes to cook.” It’s the closest Dean comes to relaxed, the evenings he’s not hustling pool, pottering around the narrow kitchen making enough chili or stew or spaghetti for a family of five. Beer in hand, but only beer, those evenings.

“I see,” says the woman, “What kind of cooking does your brother enjoy? Baking, grilling? Ethnic food? A wok, maybe?”

“He likes to make breakfast,” says Sam, because right now he’s looking back across the blank grid of years and the looming bulk of the wall at fourteen-year-old Dean, the winter they were in Oklahoma in that rundown rental house. Dean made pancakes whenever it was a weekend morning and Dad was away. Always with strawberry syrup, so Dean could shape the pancakes like people and monsters and give them gory wounds. Sam finds himself smiling, and the woman relaxes, like she’s less worried now that he’s a psychopath with a flimsy cover story, shopping for knives. Apparently Sam still gives off those vibes.

“Does he have a griddle?” she asks. Sam shakes his head. They have three saucepans, and the handle has already broken off the medium-sized one.

Griddles come in a bewildering variety. Sam is doing fine, really, but he wants to be out of there and back home at the laptop. Still, he listens carefully while the woman – Marianne, her nametag says – explains the merits of each. He goes for the heavy cast iron reversible model that covers two burners. Dean can make pancakes on the flat side and bacon on the ridged side and wield the whole thing to brain anything that crosses the salt lines at the door. Sam pays for it from a roll of bills he’d found in his pack. Another ugly secret, probably. He wishes he weren’t buying Dean’s present with this, like it’s really coming from that other he doesn’t remember. Dean wouldn’t want a present from that Sam.

“I’m sure he’ll like it,” says Marianne, when he thanks her for her help. “His name is Dean,” he tells her. God knows why.

The sun stabs even more brightly on the way back, shining in his eyes. Sam walks fast, wanting to get home. The tawdry, pathetic surge of triumph at having achieved something, or gotten away with something, has gone. The sidewalk is full of people, living purposefully in their own heads. People who don’t walk randomly into empty terror and emerge blinking with piss soaking their jeans and concerned, embarrassed bystanders prodding at them. That thought makes Sam practically scuttle up the stairs to the apartment, and he’s breathing hard when he locks the door behind him. He hangs up his jacket and goes looking for a place to put the griddle – why did he pick something fucking gigantic? – till tomorrow. He finds two of Dean’s bottles in likely hiding places. Zep blinks at him from the pile of dirty laundry in the closet; Sam backs off prudently. Finally he shoves the thing between the mattress and the bedframe, on his side of the bed. It will have to do. The apartment doesn’t offer an abundance of options.

It’s not much of a place, all in all, though they’ve surely seen worse. The stairs are steep, covered in patchy, greyed linoleum, with ridged metal stripping whose screws catch on sock feet, the appliances are ancient and semi-functional, a fire risk probably held in check by asbestos. The furniture comes with the deal and features the kind of lurid, tweedy fabric that melts more easily than it tears. But they have an old diner table with blueish confetti tones, and a crocheted afghan, which Dean brought home one day and refused to explain, covering the worst of the stains on the couch. Dean flares into these outbursts of untimely, optimistic domesticity, like those birds that get all excited and start building nests in a February thaw, weeks before the last blizzard. The afghan. A set of cooking knives that have never been used on monsters. And Zep, almost as patchily colorful as the afghan, missing half an ear and still convinced, in the face of all evidence, that each meal will be her last.

It’s fourish, but it’s a pool night, Dean won’t be home till late. Sam’s feeling OK now, contained and neutral. The door is locked and the windows are open. He changes back into the old sweats he mostly lives in these days, gets out the laptop and settles in one of the folding chairs at the table.

Research doesn’t mean much since he and Dean stopped hunting, but Sam keeps up the habit. These days he’s searching out the blandest obituaries, combing small, local papers for retired supermarket managers, dead of heart-attacks in their eighties, survived by grandchildren. He boxes them neatly in Excel charts. When Dean drags him out of the apartment Sam tries to fit his database of dull, delayed endings to the kids in strollers, the middle-aged women with briefcases, construction workers and law students and mechanics. But no matter how many exceptions he tabulates, it seems more likely that all those oblivious people, the crossing guard and the dentist and what was the griddle-woman’s name, Marianne, that none of them will make it, they’ll have their necks snapped or get caught in crossfire or get changed in some dark alley with no one there but the monster who turns them. Or just be caught with everyone else next time the world burns. Their lives look so strong and three-dimensional, _they’re_ not just some flicker of images projected on a wall, yet they keep ending and he keeps going on, keeps on coming back.

He’s trying to decide if he’s allowed to count a divorced school bus driver, dead at 48 of cancer, when he hears Dean’s step on the stair, loud and stumbling. The apartment is dark except for the blue light from the laptop screen. He must have forgotten to eat dinner. Deep enough in to dull the nagging insistence of the wall. That’s good, but Dean wants him both down there where he’s safe and up and about, eating meals. He reaches out as though he could wave the lights on and conjure a crumby plate and empty glass to avert the inevitable assault of angry concern, but then he stops, listens more closely. Dean’s key is skating over the lock. He’s drunk. The door swings open on “Hey, Sammy,” a little too loud. Dean flicks on the light and Sam blinks.

“Hey” he says. Dean drunk isn’t so bad. Dean drunk is almost as good as Dean sober, both reassuring, a friendly lie, things are going to be OK. It’s the Dean who is seldom quite either these days who worries at Sam, little gnawing teeth of selfish fear. “Had a good night?” he asks.

There’s not much work on construction crews in January, even in the South. Dean’s been bagging groceries to pay the rent, and hustling pool on the outskirts of town a night or two a week to make up the difference.

“Dude, it was awesome. We’re rich. You want anything, Sam? Seriously, the sky’s the limit. Or, well, a hundred bucks or so.” Only Dean could get drunk for real and still hustle pool like a pro. He waves a handful of crumpled bills under Sam’s nose. Sam shakes his head. _I bought you a birthday present_ he thinks.

Dean bends down to pat Zep, who has emerged in a flurry of mews to twine around Dean’s ankles. Even drunk and tired, Dean never trips over her. “You want anything, Zep?” Dean asks, “Organic catnip? That fancy cedar litter?” Zep arches against his hand and Dean rubs behind her ears till she settles into a rusty, resonant purr. For a man who as far as Sam knows had never interacted with cats before two months ago, Dean has a frighteningly encyclopedic knowledge of luxury cat goods. Sam can imagine what Dean would say if _he_ wanted organic anything. Zep is different.

Dean must have had a lot to be this wasted; a normal evening of sipping whisky hardly affects him now. But this is happy Dean, and surely Sam is allowed to be glad about that. This is the Dean who’s so fucking glad to have him back, even the defective version who can’t leave the apartment most days and walks into cold spots and wets his jeans. A piss-poor version, indeed, Sam thinks, and smiles into the fridge, where he’s poking for the bread and peanut butter and jelly. He makes two sandwiches and carries them and a plastic bag of baby carrots to the couch. Dean glances at the plates, gets up and fetches two beers. Sam shakes his head at the one Dean offers him – stupid useless gesture, not like it will help anyone for Sam not to have a beer, Dean will just drink it – and starts to pick at his sandwich.

Dean pokes him in the shoulder, leans towards him, all earnestness.

“Passed by the river on the way home,” he says, only a little slurred. “You know, Sammy, I’ve been thinking about the geese.”

“Geese?” says Sam cautiously. Dean sober is a man of practical genius. Drunk Dean, the old one who downed shots and got garrulous instead of sipping his way into silence, that old drunk Dean tended towards tangents and theories. Sam’s weirdly, fiercely happy to see him again.

“Have you noticed how many fucking geese there are in this town? Canada geese. Armies of geese coming down from Canada.There are goose-women in ballads going back to the Vikings, you know. I’m telling you, there are too many fucking geese. This is some Canadian Viking spirit invasion. Or goose maidens. ”

“Isn’t it usually, like, a swan maiden?” Sam asks. He reaches for one of the beers after all.

“Well, yeah,” says Dean. He waves half a sandwich around expansively. “But some people think there were goose versions. The swans just sounded better. But this is hunting, not a fucking ballet. It’s the geese we need to worry about. They’re out there, Sammy.”

“We could do some research, I guess,” says Sam. He could lay off obituaries a couple of days and do geese. It would almost sort of be doing something for Dean, even though Dean’s going to have forgotten this whole thing in the morning. But Dean’s standing up, grabbing his keys.

“No time like the present, Sam,” he says over his shoulder. “Carpe the fucking diem. Noctem. Whatever. We’re getting rusty. Starting to grow moss, here. I say we head out there, right now, and kill us some feathered sons of bitches.”

”Dean, wait,” says Sam, realizing too late that this is getting away from him. He’s barefoot, in sweatpants and a wifebeater. Dean’s already putting his jacket on and heading out the door.

“I’ll take point,” he calls over his shoulder, “You catch up.” And he’s clattering down the stairs while Sam is groping under the bed for his shoes.

“Fuck,” says Sam. He jams his sneakers on his sockless feet, pulls on one of Dean’s henleys, and serve Dean right if it stretches out of shape, snatches his jacket off the hook without bothering to put it on, and takes the stairs three at a time. First time since they moved here he’s walked out the door without a second thought.

Dean’s out of sight already, but if he’s really set on his literal wild goose chase he must be heading for the river and the park. Everything looks strange and large, the streets well lit but empty, as though something has vaporized the cheerfully mortal crowds and left the buildings empty and intact. The car is still parked outside, but Dean must have the keys. Anyway, it’s just about as quick to walk. Sam takes off down the block, cursing his chilly ankles, shrugging into his jacket, plotting his brother’s death and feeling almost normal.

He can hear the noise when he’s still crossing the street to the park, more an incredulous, angry mutter than honking. Geese aren’t normally nocturnal, not that Sam knows of, but it sounds like Dean’s got their attention. Sam stumbles over a slippery tussock – the grass here is covered with goose shit, Dean’s got a point, the things really are a menace – and stops, panting. He’s caught up, found Dean.

Dean is on one knee in the damp grass, muttering in Latin. The geese are gathered around him in a loose half circle, either because they are supernatural creatures held at bay by whatever Dean is doing or because they simply can’t believe this is happening. Maybe it’s the most exciting milestone in their lives since they stopped in Vegas on their last migration. As Sam hurries up Dean scatters a handful of salt and plunges a silver dagger into the ground up to its hilt. It looks good, even if it is about ten percent Dad’s journal and Dean’s accumulated experience and about ninety percent tequila. “Hi,” says Sam pointlessly, coming to a stop at Dean’s shoulder. “Shh,” says Dean. The geese hiss ominously.

Sam is half-expecting that something will happen, that one of the geese will shed its cloak of feathers and morph into some declassée Valkyrie. Deep down in Sam’s head, Dean’s still right, even drunk and stir-crazy from four months playing nurse to his damaged brother. But the geese stay geese. Angry geese. Not that that makes them less intimidating. Sam has reasonable contingency plans for Valkyries and swan maidens. He could probably cobble something together if confronted with weregeese or zombie fowl. But Dad unaccountably left actual birds out of their training.

“Uh, Dean,” he says, “Maybe we should get out of here. You know, look for other rituals. Come back another time.” He puts a hand on Dean’s shoulder and prepares to back away. The geese are edging forwards, poking their beaks at the salt on the ground, discovering that it isn’t crumbs. Sam notices that they actually have tiny but vicious –looking teeth.

There’s a sheen of sweat on Dean’s forehead, and he doesn’t look buzzed and elated any more. Sam can smell the alcohol going sour on his breath. He tries to tug Dean up, but Dean lunges forward with a snarl, snatches the dagger from the ground and lashes out at the two closest geese. They rear away, stretching out their wings, necks jabbing straight out towards Dean. Sam hauls Dean up and backwards by main strength.

“Jesus, Dean, stop it, put the knife away, we’re going,” he says. Dean lets Sam tow him back towards the guardrail between the street and the park, but the geese aren’t giving up, honking hoarsely and clapping the air angrily with their wings, crowding forward. One of them launches right at Sam and he stumbles, losing his grip on Dean. When he gets his feet back under him Dean’s down, tripped over the curb to the bike path, it looks like, and the fucking geese are jabbing at his arms and face. Sam yells, takes off his jacket and swirls it at the damn birds. They back up enough that he can hook an arm under Dean’s shoulder and get him up and out of the fucking park.

Dean is swearing steadily and he’s not putting weight on his left leg. Sam crosses the street all the same, just to be out of goose territory, and lowers Dean on one of the benches across from the park. The streetlight shows Dean’s face already swelling with bruises, even thin lines of blood. A couple of cars drive past, but clearly think better of stopping.

Sam swipes at the sweat on his face with his sleeve, then pulls the left leg of Dean’s jeans up to his knee. Nothing visibly out of alignment or poking through skin, but Dean’s shin is already swollen and almost black, and his forehead is beaded with sweat.

“Broken, you think?” Sam asks, and Dean nods tightly. Sam digs in Dean’s pocket for the keys.

“Stay here,” he says. “I’ll get the car, drive you to the hospital.”

Dean tries to sit up, like this is the craziest idea he’s ever heard. He wobbles dizzily. Pain and tequila.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Sam, you can’t take me into Emergency. I’ll just take a cab or something.”

“And then walk in the doors on your broken leg?”

“I’ll holler for help. I’ll think of something. You’re not going with me. What if you have one of your episode things there? They insist on sticking your freaky brain in one of those machines, God knows what they’ll see. God knows what their damn machines will do the Wall.”

Like Dean thinks there’d be some literal Hadrian’s wall snaking across the MRI, maybe a tiny figure of Dean patrolling it like a neurotic legionary.

“So I’ll stay out of cold spots,” says Sam. And Dean must be in more pain than he’s pretending – of course – because he grunts a concession rather than asking how, precisely, Sam expects to achieve that.

Sam leaves Dean on the bench and legs it back the three blocks to home and the Impala. At least it’s only, like, a 30 second drive to the park. Dean is still lying there, frowning in pain but unmolested by geese. Sam outright carries him to the car. He’s remembering all the reasons, apart from his own damn uselessness, why they aren’t doing this any more.

The emergency room has the same atmosphere of makeshift eternity all such places have. Dean’s pale and sweating, but the alcohol is dragging him down, now, and he dozes off against Sam’s shoulder twenty minutes in. By the time he gets seen he’s so out of it that Sam has to do all the explaining. Not that Sam can altogether blame Dean for passing on this one. Being able to tell the truth to a doctor for once is not turning out to be as gratifying as you might think it would be.

“He was mobbed by geese,” says Sam.

“He was what?” says the doctor. She’s a tall woman with a warm voice, but there is something reproving about the way the beads on her braided hair click when she turns her head.

“He’d had a few drinks, we passed the park on the way home, he declared war on the Canada geese, they took it badly,” explains Sam, editing slightly. “His ex was Canadian,” he adds, “It was a bad breakup.” Dean is frowning blearily at the ceiling from a paper-wrapped gurney; Sam’s pretty sure he didn’t hear that.

“The geese broke his leg? Was this ex of his their sister or something?” Given Dean’s theories about geese maidens, Sam supposes it’s not outside the bounds of possibility.

“They didn’t exactly break his leg,” he says, “More like they knocked him over and he cracked it on the curb. They did peck him when he was down.”

The doctor frowns reprovingly and takes Dean down for x-rays. Sam slumps in a chair in the hallway and tries not to feel at home. Eventually they bring Dean back to him.

“He’s cracked his shin. It’s not displaced. I’ll give him a local before I splint it. He shouldn’t have anesthesia with the blood alcohol he’s got going, and I doubt you want to wait here till he sobers up. You’ll need to keep an eye on those bites on his face. I’ll give you an antibiotic ointment for them. And some pills for the pain, but mind, they don’t mix with alcohol. No more drowning his sorrows in tequila or taking out his resentments on birds.” Sam promises.

By the time Sam gets Dean home and up the stairs and into bed it’s almost four in the morning and Sam is draggingly exhausted from the whole fucking tragicomedy. He gets a pillow under Dean’s leg and a blanket over him and then pulls up a chair and just sits there taking Dean in, the sour miasma of alcohol mixed with the whiff of hospital, the baggy shadows under his eyes and the stubble on his chin, the tension in his hands even when he’s passed out. They can’t go on like this.

Dean stirs and frowns, like Sam’s worry sets up a feedback loop even in his sleep. The signal’s still there, still operational, even when Dean’s drunk and reckless and attacking geese, or slack and pale and passed out. Like Morse code. _I need you to be OK because I’m not_. It’s an automated distress call Sam’s always sending out, and he knows Dean’s receiving, 24/7. It pings off of Dean in little disintegrating, radioactive blips, just the latest way Sam’s found to destroy his brother. Sam has no idea, none, how to turn it off.

He tried, after they first came here. He’d tried. He’d imagined it beating out from his wrist, a little red light flashing with his pulse, and he’d thought maybe he could stop it. He caught the wrist in a door first, almost really by accident. And it kind of worked. The signal pulsed into ordinary pain, and Dean yelled at him and wrapped the wrist and dug out something half ibuprofen, half codeine from the kit. Sam had slept till eleven the next morning and when he woke up Dean had looked OK. He groused at Sam for needing help tying his shoes, mocked him relentlessly and dragged him out -- “Fresh air, Sammy, you remember that?” -- to breakfast, worked his way through four cups of coffee without adding anything from his flask and chewed his bacon with his mouth open. So that was good. When Sam walked into one of his cold spots a few days later, left his jeans to soak with detergent in the sink and climbed out of the shower into dry sweats, he could feel it back, the signal, returning like a wart. Dean was hunched in the living room with three inches of amber liquor in a tumbler. While Sam watched from the bathroom door he’d swiped his hand over his face, like he was checking it was still there.

So Sam tried another reset. He’d gotten the wrench out of Dean’s toolbox this time, more precision, and tightened it over the pulse point, right where it was sending. He’d heard bone crack before he’d had to stop and throw up. Sam has only the haziest memory of what came next. There was noise and then Cas was there, Dean looming over his shoulder like an arresting officer. Cas had said “Sam,” with a grave nod, like they were being introduced, and had reached for his hand, like he hadn’t wanted to do when they actually had been. He’d held it in a cool dry grip while the pain went away, then vanished with nothing more than “It’s done,” to Dean.

Sam’s still not sure if Cas healed him because he agreed with Dean that it was better not to try to explain Sam to a hospital or if Dean’s protective scary has reached angel-daunting levels.

“You do anything like that again, Sammy, and I’ll fucking kill you,” Dean had said, and he hadn’t been joking. Since then Sam has relied on Dean’s job and his evenings hustling pool to at least keep him out of range enough of the time, give him some kind of respite. And to provide them with food and gas and a roof over their heads, of course. Sam’s a prince of altruism when it comes to Dean. But he can’t keep Dean from getting hurt by geese. Can’t keep him from being more himself getting half-killed by waterfowl than he’s been in months of holding and losing ground here.

Dean sleeps till noon on his birthday. Sam helps him into the bathroom and then brings him coffee and tries to make him an omelet. It ends up more like cheesey, hammy scrambled eggs, but it smells OK. When he comes back into the living room with the plate Dean’s pulled a bottle from somewhere to doctor his coffee.

“Dean,” says Sam, “The pills. You can’t. The doctor said you can’t.”

“The hell I can’t,” Dean mutters, “I don’t need the damn pills. And Winchesters have been mixing painkillers with alcohol for generations. Hate to break it to you, Sam, but that’s not what has us dying young.”

“Dean, please,” says Sam, and Dean snorts impatiently. “All right, all right, if that’s what will make you happy,” he says, “it’s not like it’s that big a deal, Jesus,” and he lets Sam take the bottle away. Sam dumps it down the sink and comes back and slots himself in beside Dean, cautiously, so he doesn’t jostle the cast. “Sometimes I miss soulless you,” says Dean, “he wasn’t so fucking uptight about everything,” but he leans back a bit against Sam’s shoulder, and he eats most of the scrambled egg stuff. It’s warmer today than it was yesterday, gusts of incongruously mild January air through the windows. Sam is dozing off himself, Dean’s head heavy and warm against his shoulder, when there’s a clap of displaced air and a trenchcoated angel carrying a white cardboard box.

“Sam, Dean,” Cas says. Then he blinks at the tableau of crutches against the couch, strappy cast on Dean’s leg and puffy bites on his face.

“You are injured,” he says, “I thought you were no longer hunting. Because of Sam.”

“Yeah, well, it was kind of unplanned,” says Sam. Dean contemplates Cas blearily.

“Guess we should have called you,” he slurs, “T’help with, you know, the wing stuff.”

“He’s on drugs,” Sam explains to Cas’s blankly inquiring look, “He was savaged by geese.”

“Canadian geese,” says Dean resentfully, and closes his eyes.

“Are they . . . particularly dangerous?” hazards Cas.

“Only when it comes to hockey and donuts,” says Sam. “And being mistaken for Viking spirit invasions.”

“I see,” says Cas. He deposits the white box he’s carrying on the table. “I brought a pie,” he says, “For your brother’s birthday. But perhaps Dean would prefer to eat it later.”

“Yeah, I think he’s out again,” says Sam. Dean’s snoring quietly. Sam manages to lower him onto the couch and stand up. “But you’re welcome to, well, hang around, or whatever.” And he means it. Cas is easy these days. Sam gets to be better than Cas expected. It feels a thousand tons lighter than being worse than Dean hoped. He’s still a little surprised when Cas sits down and accepts a cup of coffee. War in heaven must really be a bitch, if Sam’s conversation and Dean’s snores qualify as a welcome coffee break.

“Pliny the Elder says geese are capable of wisdom. One was a friend of the philosopher Lacydes,” he offers. He’d done some Googling this morning. It seems like the most Caslike of his current small talk gambits.

“Perhaps you should urge Dean to take a more philosophical approach.”

“Perhaps,” agrees Sam. He pushes the laptop aside to put down his cup.

“You were working,” Cas says, gesturing at the laptop.

Sam smiles. “Not really,” he says. But for some reason he pulls up the obituary from last night, tells Cas about Sean O’Fallon, the school bus driver.

“D’you think it counts as a good life? I mean, it kind of sucked. He died before he was fifty, no demons or angels or deals or anything. And his marriage broke up. But it says he went hiking with his daughters on weekends. He still had a family.”

“I don’t think I am a judge of such things, Sam.”

“But what if it was like that for Dean? If he’d gotten to stay with Lisa, if I’d never come back? They might have split up anyway, some damn tumor could have metastasized on him. Even if I could go back all the way, get myself out of the picture, it might not be enough.”

“Dean doesn’t want you out of the picture. You’re necessary to him.”

“I’m not the rock Dean leans on, Cas. Maybe the one he scrapes a living on.” Like some shipwrecked sailor trying to live on lichen.

Cas gives him one of those abrupt, hieratic glares, like an electric wading bird. “Self-pity is not among the attractive human qualities,” he says.

“Don’t project it all on humans,” says Sam, “Remember, you’re talking to the guy who’s spent quality time with Lucifer.” Even if he doesn’t remember most of it. Still, Cas has a point. “How’s the war going, anyway?” Sam asks belatedly. The last few months, since he woke up to find Cas alive again, Cas has looked less human than before things went down at Stull, but more tired.

“Difficult,” says Cas. Which is pretty informative, for him. He hesitates, then fixes Sam with another look. “It is quite possible that I am doing more harm than I am averting. And my brothers and sisters die either way. You and Dean are not the only ones whose circumstances don’t lend themselves to easy choices.”

As far as Sam can tell, his and Dean’s circumstances at the moment don’t lend themselves to choices of any kind, except Dean’s idiot choice to stick around and be dragged down by him, which, let’s face it, is a fucking foregone conclusion. He wonders if he would have suggested at first that Dean should be back with Lisa if he’d believed, deep down, that there was the smallest chance of it happening. But it’s far from the worst they’ve been, that much is true.

“I’m sorry,” he says awkwardly to Cas. This time the angel’s look is more rueful than judging. He stands up, hands Sam his mug.

“I should go back,” he says, “Give Dean the appropriate felicitations when he wakes.”

“Will do,” says Sam. He makes an abortive, stupid move to show the angel to the door, but Cas is already gone, with that familiar flock-of-pigeons-breaking-the-sound-barrier effect.

“Cas was here,” says Dean muzzily, when he wakes up next.

“Yeah,” says Sam, “But he had to go. War stuff. He says happy birthday.” Or close enough. “He brought you a pie.”

Dean brightens at the mention of pie. “Get me my crutches,” he says.

Dean insists he doesn’t need help in the bathroom, so Sam busies himself getting plates and forks, taking the pie out of the box – strawberry rhubarb, fresh and out of season, Sam wonders if Cas went time-traveling for pie – and digging the skillet out from under the mattress. He should have gotten ribbon or wrapping paper or something. Or cake and candles. At least they have pie.

“Happy birthday,” he says, when Dean emerges. He feels incredibly stupid. There’s a reason they don’t usually do this. Dean looks startled, stopped on his crutches.

“I, um, got you something,” Sam says, with a half-wave in the direction of the skillet. Dean doesn’t say anything. “It’s a skillet,” Sam goes on, “So you can, you know, slave in the kitchen for me.”

Dean crutches the rest of the way over. He frowns at the skillet, reaches out to touch it, frowns at Sam.

“Where’d you get it?” he asks. Like he thinks Sam has been shoplifting skillets.

“You know, Hardison’s, that housewares place on Clinton,” says Sam, wondering if Dean is about to demand to see the receipt. What the hell is this?

“You went out on your own?” says Dean. Oh. That.

“Yes, I went out on my fucking own, Dean, I’m not two,” Sam answers, “And you’re welcome, by the way.”

Dean takes a hand off his crutch and drags it over his face.

“Seriously, Sam, it’s not a good idea, ” he says. “What’s to stop you freezing half way across a street? I mean, thanks, yeah, I appreciate the gesture, but you hit by a car is not what I want for my birthday. What the hell got into you, anyway? Most of the time I practically have to drag you out the door on a leash.”

“Or, you know, take off to the park at eleven at night to hunt geese,” says Sam. “I did OK having your back last night when you were making a fucking alcoholic idiot of yourself.”

They glare at each other. Dean deflates, subsides awkwardly into a chair, setting the crutches aside.

“You didn’t have any trouble? Nothing jogging your memory?” he asks, his voice quieter.

Dean won’t believe Sam, that he’s not flashing back when it happens, that he doesn’t remember. That there’s nothing there, in his cold spots, just a shove out an airlock into starless vacuum. It frightens Sam more than any hell he can imagine. That’s a failure of his imagination, no doubt.

“I didn’t walk out of my head and wet myself,” Sam shoots back, then bites his lip. Shit. “Relax, Dean,” he adds, “I don’t think I did time in the cage watching cooking shows. Or those late-night ads for juicers. That would be a little harsh, don’t you think, even for Satan.”

He bitchfaces deliberately at Dean, willing him to accept it, and after a moment Dean’s shoulders relax.

“Bitch,” he says, “You love watching me cook. You’d totally watch a cooking show if I was on it.” Which is Dean’s apology and thank you. God, they’re bad at this.

“Maybe if you wore a frilly apron,” says Sam, “ _Only_ a frilly apron.”

After that Dean digs into his pie and drinks plain coffee before going back to napping on the couch, Zep draped across his chest. When Sam’s tidying up the leftover Chinese food they order in for dinner he starts to put the griddle away in the cupboard with their three pans, but Dean says “Put it on the stovetop. Let’s see how it fits,” and even crutches over to rearrange it when Sam, apparently, manages to get it wrong. He doesn’t say anything, just gives a grunt of satisfaction when it notches into place over the burners.

“C’mon to bed, Sammy,” he says.

They kiss for a while. Sex is mostly a non-starter for them these days, Dean usually tense and half-drunk, Sam obscurely ashamed, wondering what will happen if he walks out the airlock in mid-act. Dean would understand, of course. Dean always fucking understands. He’d joke about watersports. It would be great, is what it would be. Sam can fuck Dean and Dean can fucking understand him. But tonight they move against each other warm and easy, despite the awkwardness of Dean’s strapped leg, the puffy bruises on his face. Neither of them reaches for the lube, sets a destination. Dean’s hands are in Sam’s hair, Sam grips Dean’s hips to line him up, slings his legs on either side of Dean’s, careful of the cast, and ruts down against him almost lazily at first, Dean arching up against him, dicks sliding against each other with a half-painful friction. When they’re sweaty and gasping, Dean tugging at Sam’s hair, Sam leans into a kiss, biting at Dean’s lips, rocking his hips down sharply in a hard rhythm, and Dean comes with a muffled yell. Sam follows, sliding home easily in the slick of Dean’s come.

Dean runs his hands through Sam’s hair over and over, afterwards. Sam’s never even been sure Dean knows that he does that; it’s certainly higher on the list of things they will never talk about than the gay incest sex itself. The dim light from the streetlight outside catches Dean’s eyes, fixed on Sam’s face.

“You didn’t have to get me anything,” Dean says at last, “Just, I, y’know, I want you to be all right.” Then he closes his eyes decisively and rolls over, his back to Sam.

Like most of Dean’s few wants, this one is terrifyingly modest and impossible. Sam stays awake a long time, listening to Dean’s heavy breathing, staring at the ceiling he can’t see.

He wakes up early next morning. Dean has an arm flung across his chest, hot and heavy, and his face is mashed against Sam’s shoulder. He looks relaxed, idiotically blissful even, all the lines smoothed away. Zep is curled against Dean’s side, tail twitching faintly. When Sam stirs, Dean smacks his lips, smearing drool.

Sam tries to nudge Dean’s arm away gently.

“I have to get up, Dean.”

Dean opens one eye.

“You’re annoying and my cat doesn’t like you.,” he says, not moving.

“Your cat doesn’t like anyone,” says Sam. Which is true. Sam she at least tolerates. She bit Bobby.

Dean makes a cross, sleepy _mrrrmph_ sound and rolls over. Zep, dislodged, stretches elaborately, gives Sam a cool, baleful stare, and settles in a neat loaf shape by Dean’s head. Sam pads into the kitchen area, puts coffee on, sits down and opens the laptop. There’s the file with his obituary charts, thousands of ordinary lives and deaths. Little boxes like the glass squares in the reptile house at the zoo, a catalogue of dozy exotics, documented microenvironments. He and Jess took a trip to San Diego once, first time Sam had ever been to one of the big zoos. All those living creatures in the world, it made Sam’s undisclosed bestiary of banshees and wendigos and poltergeists look dull.

He bypasses Excel, opens his browser. His fingers hesitate over the keyboard. It’s not like Dean and Bobby and even Cas haven’t looked for something better, for some way to deal with the wall. But maybe that’s the wrong angle. Time to think outside the box, outside the cage. Like, if these episodes of his act like some kind of seizure, even if they’re caused by a Death-built brain wall, could be some seizure treatment would work on them. He jots down “seizures” on the pad of scratch paper by the computer. Maybe they’re wrong, keeping this away from doctors. And even if he can’t be fixed, and God knows Sam’s gone wrong trying to fix stuff more often than not, there’s stuff he can do. Take a course online, or something. Live with this. Work from home like those Moms of three who get scammed on the internet. Buy some fucking Depends and get one of those seizure-sensing dogs and go _out_. He could use an ally against the Dean/Zep axis. Anything where he can have something to offer Dean every evening, some classic codependent incest exchange of honey-I’m-home, how-was-your-day. So Dean won’t have to feel them both sink a bit deeper every time he walks through the door.

Sam’s so absorbed he doesn’t notice Dean getting up till he’s crutching himself towards the coffee. He pauses on his way, takes a hand off the crutch to run his thumb along the ridges of the skillet that’s taking up half the stovetop.

“S’nice. Sammy. Really. I’ll make you breakfast. Some day when I haven’t been crippled by waterfowl,” he says.

“You can make me pancakes,” says Sam, “Pancakes shaped like scary geese.” Dean swipes at him with his crutch, almost knocking Sam’s coffee onto the keyboard. “Maybe with little Viking helmets,” Sam adds thoughtfully, and turns back to Google. He’s going to go on working on this, if it takes him till next January 24th. It’s Dean’s birthday present.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Under Repair(the feathers of an angel remix)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1601060) by [tifaching](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tifaching/pseuds/tifaching)




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